Rural Development

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Professor Petra Tschakert

Professor Petra Tschakert joined UWA as a new Centenary Professor in Rural Development in May 2015.

She is an internationally recognized scholar working at the intersection of climate change adaptation, social-ecological resilience, and participatory research within a development context.

She was coordinating lead author on Livelihoods and Poverty (Chapter 13) of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Working Group II on Impacts, Vulnerability, and Adaptation, and a member of the core writing team of the Synthesis Report.

Her research activities and practice focus broadly on human-environment interactions and more specifically on rural livelihoods, environmental change, marginalization and social learning.

Her main interest lies in the theoretical and empirical intersections of political ecology, socio-environmental justice, and complex systems science, reflecting her long-term commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and extended periods of field work and capacity building in several parts of Africa.

Caption: Professor Petra Tschakert with miners of Subin, Ghana, as part of an interdisciplinary research grant on gold mining and Buruli ulcer, an environmentally-induced disease, funded by the National Science Foundation.